Nick Riemer has given us permission to publish this opinion piece in the Australian:
MANAGEMENT SHOULD PAY FOR THEIR MISTAKES
Nick Riemer
The Australian
February 29 2012
http://www.theaustralian.com.
A COUPLE of weeks ago, the University of Sydney asked 100 of my colleagues – the equivalent of three large departments – to show cause why they should not be sacked.
From the CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin:
The universities of Western Ontario and Toronto have signed a deal with Access. Copyright that allows for surveillance of faculty correspondence, unjustified restriction to copyrighted works and two million dollars in fees that will be passed along to students.
While not yet a significant component of Australian higher education, the for-profit sector has been growing rapidly in the US. Here are some articles on the topic:
Various organisations are allowing free online access to courses including universities such as MIT and Stanford. How will these impact conventional universities?
http://chronicle.com/article/Badges-Earned-Online-Pose/130241/
After decades of bumping along with an antique publishing model, researchers have suddenly woken up and found that they are strong. More than 4700 have signed a pledge not to write, review or edit for Elsevier journals, in a movement that The Economist has called the Academic Spring. How did we get here?
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/09/the-future-of-academic-publishing/
What a business model! The big academic publishers have academics write their content, review their content, and edit their content all largely free of charge. Then they sell the results to universities at increasingly exhorbitant prices.
Almost all academic institutions have introduced some method of measuring “quality of teaching” based on student assessment in recent years. The proclaimed aim is to improve teaching. Academics are well aware of the shortcomings of this methodology and regale each other with stories of its absurdities. Most of these stories are isolated instances and/or apocryphal. Surely a better method would measure the outcomes – future performance of students - rather than popularity, but of course that is much harder to measure, at least in the short term.
http://www.irascibleprofessor.com/
This blog by Mark Shapiro, while focused on state higher education in the US, has many interesting comments and facts. In particular check out
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-07-14-11.htm
by Ralph Westfall.
An article by William Moseley of McAlester College in St Paul, MN, USA in Al Jazeera.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012271229581421.html
But just when the US needs it most, public support for higher education in the US is being rolled back at unprecedented rates. In my own state of Minnesota (long known for its well-educated workforce), our college and university system now only receives 18 per cent of its revenue from the state, down from over 50 per cent in the 1970s. Other universities, such as the University of Michigan and Penn State, receive only 6 per cent and 4 per cent respectively of their budgets from state legislatures. On average, state funding for higher education has fallen by 40 per cent since 1980 (with declines accelerating in the past five years).
How the ratio and other statistics on the number of students versus the number of academics are calculated is a controversial question. Which academics should be counted? Teaching-research academics only? Some Australian universities with large numbers of research centres have very many postdoctoral fellows and other research-only staff who teach only occasional courses. Should we add in research-only academics – in which case strong research universities are flattered? Should we count casual staff and sessional teachers? This is a topic we expect to generate considerable discussion.
Curtin University has awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters to Rosmah Mansor, the wife of Najib Razak, the Prime Minister of Malaysia.
In Malaysia, Ms Rosmah has a reputation as a big spender. She reportedly spent $100,000 at one Sydney fashion boutique in January and has been forced to deny reports that she splashed out $US24 million on a diamond ring and another $US200,000 on a designer handbag. Her online critics said Ms Rosmah was only qualified to spend money and one post appeared to show Curtin University degree torn up in disgust.